General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Is it possible for a planetary system to form and support life similar to earth-life inside a region of 'timespace' (which is the space within a black-hole), assuming that there is enough space/tim...
My world is set in ancient times on a planet similar to Earth, but with a different civilization and different geography (and lots of canals). I need to find a way of giving the inhabitants better ...
The Diclonii are an evolutionary offshoot of modern homo sapiens from the Elfen Lied series. Most Diclonii can get distinguished from humans thanks to small bone and cartilage horns resembling cat ...
So, I'm making my first stab at worldbuilding, and I got this idea for a largely water world with only a single continental landmass, a little smaller than Africa in terms of land area, roughly c...
In my fictional world, the planet has some very strong winds that regularly blow across large areas of land. In this world, however, very large, tall trees grow (the reason for the size of the tree...
This question on space stack begins to tackle how a bird could fly inside an O'Neill cylinder, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/27665/can-birds-fly-inside-an-oneill-cylinder. Here is the ...
Rivers of lava are a staple of fantasy. But in the real world, lava flows are usually very short-lived phenomenons caused by volcanic eruptions. Is there some plausible way on an otherwise earth-l...
If we didn't have the capability to use faster than light travel then how could we stay unified and are any realistic examples in science fiction?
I'd like to randomly generate between 1 and 20 million stars for a spiral galaxy resembling our Milky Way. This is of course far fewer than our galaxy (estimated between 150 to 300 billion), but I'...
A planet much like Earth orbits a star much like the Sun, but with one difference: the energy from the star is magically transformed into sound within the planet's atmosphere. There is no longer st...
I had posted a question a couple of days ago asking if it would be possible for an artificial satellite/cosmic body at the L1 orbit to block out the Sun, but the logistics of that is a little too e...
Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and copper is a significantly more abundant metal in the Earth's Crust, at about 70 PPM compared to tin at 2 PPM. Because tin was the limiting factor in bro...
How quickly could a bacterial colony / virus / pool-'o-prions / [whatever] digest, disintegrate, or otherwise liquefy an ordinary terrestrial biological system? Think something along the lines of ...
When elves decide to conceive, a male must add his genetic material at different intervals over several years to the female. Genetic material could come from a single male or various ones with no c...
Is it possible that life could come about on land if a planet has a dense atmosphere? (This applies to non-carbon based life as well).
On Earth, civilization grew up around river valleys. Rivers are useful as a water source, a food source, and a waste disposal system, but their most important function to a civilization is enabling...
I have some plasma life forms that have evolved within the photosphere of a star and also capable of existing on a neutron star and the ergoshpere or accretion disk of a blackhole. This lifeform c...
Is my planet realistic? It doesn't need to be able to support life as it's just another planet in my solar system, but is a planet with such a high density and gravity really possible? I calculated...
In my world, a group of "lamplighters" seek to turn off unused stars to conserve the energy for later use. This serves a few purposes, but mainly: It delays the heat-death of the Universe to some...
this video surprisingly has some similar properties i try to make and better at explaining the science properties (without me knowing the science stuff before) warning!! don't watch the video when...
I have been making a future colonization scenario where people have vast colonies on Mars and cloud top bases on Venus. These things are unbelievably large. I've already thought of a way to travel ...
so i want to create a monster that dwell or fly inside thunderstorm as their defense mechanism, though they do goes down to get food, i want to know what method or modifications need for creature t...
In the anime, called Attack on Titan, the primary antagonists are these huge, humanoid creatures, called titans. Titans have sizes between 15 and 4 meters. Larger titans aren't unknown, but they s...
The setting I've cooked up for a D&D campaign I'm running features a fair amount of buildings that have been totally abandoned by civilization for hundreds or even a thousand years. Obviously w...
I was having a discussion with several people on whether or not a lightning dragon can be biologically plausible, without any magic involved. We came to two main possibilities and I'd love to see f...
My friends and I are building a world with a 50 mile high volcano on it. The mountain is the result of some bored god deciding to play a joke on everyone. Or, some other god got angry and decided ...
Just assume we are long into the future, all other parameters have been met and we have the technology, will and money to terraform our moon and keep it so. Atmosphere, as commonly agreed on, would...
Scenario : Due to the effects of a magical overload, there are people in my world who lose their magic. Those that don't go outright insane are left with damaged nervous systems and a high body tem...
In my setting there is a civilization that has a decisive advantage in a fundamentally agrarian world; it is consistently more efficient in its choices of crops and livestock. Rodents reproduce fa...
Perissodactyla is an order of mammals consisting currently of the seventeen species of horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs. Usually, any clade is connected by a coupling of genetics and physical morph...
I am working on a planet were life (trees, plants, food, animals, humans) would be bigger/taller than Earth. I have learned that oxygen level or gravity, for example, could help change the size of ...
We already know how to heat things up, but what about cooling them? How do we make Earth's climate like that of Mars? Or go further: can we, by any hypothetical ways, make Earth somewhat like Pluto?
In modern day society, few or many people have been fascinated with integrating robotic parts to their bodies. But sometimes that idea is taken to the next step, in which people want to have their ...
So I was recently inspired by the answers that I saw on this stack exchange to the following question: Feasibility of H.G. Wells' Continuously-Exploding Atomic Bombs And it occurred to me that you...
So I'm working on a fictional planet which would experience a daytime sky similar to this. This particular picture is from the movie Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets. Fictional alien atmosph...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series The orang pendek is a cryptid that reportedly inhabits remote, mountainous forests on the island of Sumatra (likely evolving from orangutan...
I understand that in order to compress and expand spacetime, an Alcubierre drive would require some sort of "exotic matter" with a negative energy density. Is that sort of exotic matter purely hyp...
This is a follow up question to Sky of Earth and Seas of Sky I have a medieval fantasy setting where people live in a vast expanse of giant caves contained in a sort of giant Stanford torus. This...
I have a spaceship which I want to have travel very quickly around a system like our own solar system -- let's say about 10 million miles per minute, which would go from Mars to Earth in ~15 minute...
I was just bitten by a radioactive stopwatch, gaining the voluntary ability to experience time at twice the usual rate. While doing so, for every second of real time, two seconds occur within my bo...
In Stellaris fungoids are, well, intelligent funguses; some Earth-like, two looking like intelligent species infected by funguses, and the rest looking alien. Let's get into the actually basics an...
I have an interstellar ship going from earth to a nearby star system using current technology and chemical fuel. The ship has been created and is being managed by a self sufficient android. The an...
as the title, what materials or ingredients in modern gunpowder that if change to be expensive or rare to get, can ruin the evolution of advance gun or can turn modern gun obsolete or undesirable ?...
We played with technology too powerful for humans to wield and opened a gateway to a parallel universe, on a dark world with a dying sun. The dominant lifeforms on this world are semi-sentient flyi...
My story has several key locations that I would like to ground in a real place in North America. It takes place 50-60 years in the future after 97% of humanity has been wiped out. I'm having a hell...
I wanted to have characters that can control energy and matter, so Dr Manhattan came to mind as a great example of a character that does that. Information on him says that he has complete awarenes...
If people were attempting to build a space station beyond the Hill Sphere, (outside of the area where Earth's gravity dominates), and wanted to mine the raw materials for the station from dwarf pla...
We've just started 36th century, humanity is colonizing stars right and left. Technology is well developed, you know, typical Sci-Fi stuff. In 23rd century we finally were able to create true AI. ...
Could a planet be hot enough that oceans could form at the poles, but would boil at the equator? And would oceans form at all on this planet?
So, my setting operates with some futuristic tech, which turned out to be pretty lame (especially nanomachines, they're just fancy pants medicine). Therefore, to spice things up, I encased it in a ...
